Alex isn’t an easy person to love (not like Hellie had been, all light and warmth and unthinking affection). She doesn’t find it easy in herself to love others, either: she’s prickly sides and sharp edges you could cut yourself on, acerbic and defensive and quick to shove others away, but there’s something about Il Bastone which has been sanding down those edges.
It’s not Lethe itself — fuck Lethe, honestly — but there’s something here, in those buttery-yellow lamps, the stained-glass windows, the old floorboards worn soft from a couple centuries’ passage of feet, the sensation of the building alive around them and that it cared about them. Magic. Actual, real magic, and not the society kind that made her want to be sick.
(Enough to make you start to believe in what Darlington had loved about all this shit.)
So she shifts his glass into her other hand, and she reaches out. Her hands are freezing; her circulation was always terrible, her body starving-thin with so little padding on it, then drawn even tauter from the years she’d kept the hunger and the Grays at bay with drugs. But she reaches out, warily, and she takes his hand.
no subject
It’s not Lethe itself — fuck Lethe, honestly — but there’s something here, in those buttery-yellow lamps, the stained-glass windows, the old floorboards worn soft from a couple centuries’ passage of feet, the sensation of the building alive around them and that it cared about them. Magic. Actual, real magic, and not the society kind that made her want to be sick.
(Enough to make you start to believe in what Darlington had loved about all this shit.)
So she shifts his glass into her other hand, and she reaches out. Her hands are freezing; her circulation was always terrible, her body starving-thin with so little padding on it, then drawn even tauter from the years she’d kept the hunger and the Grays at bay with drugs. But she reaches out, warily, and she takes his hand.